Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Fly-in Car and Air Show

The Compound is ten miles from the nearest grocery store. There is however, a small airstrip located just a few cornfields away which hosts an annual Fly-in, Drive-in Car and Air Show. So Saturday, when I noticed the stunt planes flying overhead, I decided to forego my cloistered existence and scoot over under gorgeous, sunny skies.

An immaculate Model T, the car that changed the world and Henry Ford's crown jewel.

M151A2 Jeep. I drove the piss out of these as an MP in the service of our Dear Country in the seventies. I managed to wrap about a hundred feet of steel cable around a rear axle once, while f@#kin' around driving in tall weeds at an abandoned air base in The Canal Zone. I used the front drive wheels and skidded the rears all the way back to the motor pool.

Fun times. Took a cutting torch to remove it.

Plywood fire wall. Kind of like using a napkin for a condom.

No bikes in the show, just a bunch of baggers in the motorcycle parking area, and this hideous softail with an extended springer. Only redeeming feature was a re-bar fender strut.

Nice older brass radiator Model T, love seeing those. Seems like all the ex-MP's I know had all the fun. The electrician at work tells me the U.S. MP's and their German counterparts would give each other sobriety tests before returning to the base (wouldn't want to wreck a jeep...). Know a guy out here that has a Stearman. He has a standing offer, come up with the fuel money and a donation to the maintenance fund, and he'll take you up. Some day I might get brave and go up with him. I keep thinking of my old man and how he scared the S&@t out of me with some hammerhead stalls he pulled one time, and then there was the time a friend pulled a surprise roll in a Cessna right over Folsom Lake....start thinking that pilots are worse adrenalin junkies than bikers. Maybe some day.

Yeah, I wasn't the most dedicated MP. I was busted for having half a pound of weed in High School and thrown in jail. This was in the just post-Viet Nam, all-volunteer era, yet the Cold War was still going strong. Uncle Sam was having problems getting "volunteers." The recruiters would check the arrest blotters and make contact to inform you that the judge would let you off if you joined for a three year hitch. So, I did. Probably 60% of the recruits in those days joined to get off of crimes ranging from drug possession to manslaughter. (Seriously, one guy from Texas beat his wife's boyfriend to death with a pipe and was allowed to skate 'cause he joined. Shortly after getting to his duty station, however, he was busted for hitting an officer and sent to Leavenworth.) The Army took eighteen-year-old stoners, gave us six weeks of training, then gave us a gun and a badge and told us to enforce the law.I was assigned to a tactical unit in Panama where I mostly escorted convoys and did checkpoint security and shit. I hated it at the time but I look back upon those days fondly.

Governments and their ever shifting 'moral' platform, aren't they just fabulous mate, as you said though, brilliant memories and very likely managed to divert any future recurrence of getting caught with half an elbow of weed stuffed up your shirt. Fuck man, so envious of guys like you and Laz who were just enough older than I to really experience that whole wonderful/horrible era.